The chances of making it through a psychology program
You attend your first lecture of the year. A sea of faces surround you. You remember there is another psychology class just as big as this. Your lecturer arrives, looks at you all, and tells you the department has around 30 places on offer each year in the Master of Clinical Psychology program. She does not want to raise your expectations, so she tells you there is only a small chance that you will become a registered psychologist. Is she right? We must make a few assumptions, but it turns out that she is wrong. It’s a mistake we all make and we are doing our students a disservice. Let’s look at the conversion rate for moving through the psychology program and reassess the chances that you can progress through to being a registered psychologist.
In 2019, the total domestic load in the undergraduate pass degree program was 19,897 EFTSL. Of course, this total covers at least three years and isn’t the actual number of students. However, let’s assume students are evenly distributed across the three years. We can divide 19,897 by 3, which gives us 6632 (see the figure for an overview).
This is the number (roughly) of students completing their program and looking to enter Honours or another fourth-year course. Yes, this is a big assumption, but remember the 19,897 EFTSL also includes the load of students who are taking subjects in psychology as a part of other degrees like biology, history, sociology etc.
The load in Honours programs was 4137 EFTSL in 2019. Honours is typically a one-year program, so we can assume that the number of EFTSL is roughly equivalent to the number of students. Your 6632 Pass degree graduates have 4137 Honours places to compete for. This works out to be a conversion rate of 62.4 per cent. This is the first hurdle you must jump and things are not looking too bad.
Indeed, the load in Honours is growing faster than the load in any other program in psychology. It increased from 1450 EFTSL in 2010 to 4137 EFTSL in 2019. Your chances are improving all the while.
You finish Honours and now you want to apply for training in a professional program. There are two at your university: the Master of Professional Psychology (5+1) and the Master of Clinical Psychology. There is a lot of competition given there are 4137 students. However, your chances are improved by the fact that people also take up places in doctoral research programs. There were 1516 EFTSL in such programs in 20192.
Let’s assume that this load is distributed evenly across the four years that people usually take to complete the program. This means that each year there are 379 places taken up by those wishing to pursue a research program. Your competition is reduced by 4137 minus 379, which leaves 3758.
How many places are you competing for? We took the following figures from the Psychology Board of Australia website. The number of provisional registrants in ‘higher degree’ programs was 2599. (This is PsyBA talk for the specialist Masters). The number of provisional registrants in the 5+1 programs was 1187.
These programs both take two years to full registration3, so we can halve these numbers to get a rough idea of the number of places, which is 1300 for higher degree4 and 594 for 5+1 programs, or a total of 1894 places. We have 3758 students who could vie for entry into these programs, which would be 1894/3758 or 50.4 per cent. Those students who complete Honours and are not taking up a research degree would appear to have a 1 in 2 chance of getting into a Master’s program.
The load in Honours is growing faster than the load in any other program in psychology. It increased from 1450 EFTSL in 2010 to 4137 EFTSL in 2019. Your chances are improving all the while
But wait, there’s more…
The above looks at programs offered by institutions, the membership of HODSPA. However, there is another route to becoming a registered psychologist, which we tend to ignore, even though most registered psychologists in Australia have come through this pathway. This is the 4+2 route, which students can enter until 2022. It will be phased out completely by 2029, hopefully to be replaced numerically by the 5+15.
In 2019, there were 1716 provisional registrants taking a 4+2. Again, we can divide this by two (4+2) to obtain a rough idea of the number of places in a year, which comes to 858. If we add this to the 1894 places offered through your programs, we come up with 2752 places. We can now divide this 2752 by 3758 to get an idea of the chances a graduating Honours student will have to enter a program and become a professional psychologist. It is 73.2 per cent. Thus, three out of four Honours graduates can obtain a place that will enable them to become a registered psychologist.
So, what is the likelihood that someone pursuing a degree in psychology will become a registered psychologist? If we multiply the Honours conversion rate of 0.624 by the professional conversion rate of 0.732, we get 0.456. As you stare at the class in front of you, a student commencing psychology has roughly a 1 in 2 chance of becoming a registered psychologist. Not bad odds really.
Why do we all assume that it is difficult to become a psychologist, given the above? Part of the problem is that we focus upon clinical psychology. There were 1300 places in programs leading to an Area of Practice Endorsement in 2019. We know that around 75 per cent of these are in clinical programs. Our 3758 Honours graduates are competing for 975 places in Master of Psychology (Clinical) programs. They have a 0.26 chance of obtaining a place in such a program, or 1 in 4.
If we calculate the likelihood that a first-year student will obtain a place in a Master of Clinical Psychology, it is 0.26 * 0.624, or 0.16. So, a first-year student has a 1 in 6 chance of becoming a clinical psychologist. This is probably much better than most of us would have assumed, but it suggests that we forget that it is much easier for someone to become a registered psychologist. And they can pick up clinical training through a bridging program later6 in their training journey.
1Assoc Prof R. Meuter, Chair HODSPA, Queensland University of Technology
Prof L. Burton MAPS, Deputy Chair HODSPA, University of Southern Queensland
Assoc Prof C. Litchfield, Secretary HODSPA, University of South Australia
Assoc Prof K. Burke MAPS Treasurer HODSPA, Central Queensland University
Prof S. Kent, Past-Chair HODSPA, La Trobe University
2 This is an underestimate of the load in research degrees, because some institutions classify them as ‘science’, which is not captured in our load numbers.
3 You can be fully registered after completing the two-year Master’s program. You only must complete the Registrar program to obtain an Area of Practice Endorsement.
4 This aligns with the number I (NB) obtained when I asked people for the number of places in their speciality Area of Practice Endorsement programs.
5 There are 26 accredited 5+1 programs on the APAC website with more to come (bit.ly/3lapICT).
6 Of course, these are numbers looked at across the country. Individual institutions and states/territories may be quite different.